An Activist’s Guide to Helping People Protect America’s Wild Places
Every wilderness area that’s ever been protected has a story. And every story starts with people who care. You, the grassroots stalwarts, are the ones who really make a difference.
This guidebook is a work in progress. Its aim is to arm you with the kinds of background information that will help you gain vital ground in your battle for wilderness designations. It is designed to be forward-looking to ensure that we are steadily making progress in securing lasting wilderness protections for our special wild places. Just as the quest for wilderness by law should move forward every year, we hope that we can continue to add to this guidebook in the future.
Many of the sections in this guidebook are based on materials we’ve prepared over the years for activist training sessions. Because we haven’t included all of that information, we’ve added a reference section in the back. We hope you will overlook what will undoubtedly be some “purposeful redundancy” (as wilderness champion and former Congressman Mo Udall would call it) on important topics.
The Wilderness Act has celebrated its 40th birthday. It has helped the American people protect 109 million acres, but there is much more to be done. We hope that this guidebook will help you in your wilderness work and that you will find it a useful and enjoyable publication that engenders teamwork, that has spirit and spunk, that sparks and strengthens wilderness campaigns, and that helps lead to more wilderness protection. We’ve also included throughout the guidebook a number of inspiring quotations from well-known, as well as unsung, wilderness heroes. It is these unsung heroes that truly are the backbone and the hope of the wilderness movement. As Wilderness Society cofounder Robert Marshall said, "There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness.”
